Lemon Posset: The Cream-Set Pudding and Its Older Hot Form

A lemon posset is three things in a small glass: double cream, sugar or honey, and lemon juice, finished in ten minutes. It is the most reliable of the easy English puddings, and one of the oldest, but in its present form it is not what a posset used to be. The original posset was a hot drink prescribed for almost everything. The route from one to the other runs through Tudor still-rooms, Stuart cookery books, and one specific Hannah Glasse recipe of 1747.

What a posset originally was

The posset, in its early form, was a hot drink. Warm milk was poured into a deep cup, then wine or strong ale was added, then sugar or honey, then a small handful of spices: nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, sometimes ginger. The acid and alcohol curdled the milk, separating it into a thick, soft curd on top and a thinner, alcohol-rich whey beneath. It was drunk hot, often in bed, often as a remedy: for colds, for chills, for sleeplessness, for fevers, for almost every household complaint short of a broken bone.

Gervase Markham's The English Housewife of 1615 gives several posset recipes, including one called Small Mead made on a base of fresh honey, water, rosemary, and sweet briar. He describes it as a light fermentation for immediate household consumption rather than for the cellar, kept clear and thin and drunk at the spring table. Every properly run household had some on the go through May, he writes. The honey-and-herb base of the Small Mead is recognisably an ancestor of the cream-and-honey posset later cooks settled on.

The shift from drink to dish

The transition from hot drink to cold set pudding happened gradually across the seventeenth century. The richer households developed dedicated posset cups: two-handled vessels, often lidded, sometimes silver or fine ceramic, with a spout in the lower part for drinking the thin whey separately from the thick curd. Many survive in museum collections. The Victoria and Albert Museum and the Holburne Museum both have substantial holdings.

By the late seventeenth century, the recipes had begun to lean further on the cream. The wine and ale were used less; the cream and the sweetener became more dominant; the dish was eaten with a spoon rather than drunk. The hot service persisted longer than the alcohol did: cream was still being heated and curdled with lemon juice into the eighteenth century, then served warm in glasses to set as it cooled.

The lemon-juice version is the one that survives. By the time Hannah Glasse was writing in the 1740s, "lemon posset" meant cream set with citrus juice rather than wine or ale, sweetened lightly, and held in shape in a small glass at room temperature or below. The hot ancestor had become a cold dessert.

Hannah Glasse, 1747

Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, first published in 1747, became the standard English cookery book for the rest of the eighteenth century. Glasse wrote with the explicit intention of being readable by an ordinary household servant, and her recipes are stripped of the flourishes that the courtly cookery books carried.

Her lemon posset is three ingredients: cream, sugar, lemon juice. She heats the cream to a simmer, removes it from the heat, stirs in the sugar and the lemon juice, and pours the mixture into small glasses to cool. That is the entire method. The chemistry, heated cream proteins coagulating around the acid from the lemon, produces a soft, spoonable set in two hours in a cold larder. Modern refrigeration makes the set firmer; eighteenth-century cooks accepted a softer texture and ate accordingly.

The Glasse posset is the direct ancestor of every lemon posset on a modern restaurant menu. The proportions have not changed substantially. The technique has not changed at all.

Spring honey instead of sugar

Substituting spring honey for the sugar gives a different result and, in May, a better one. Spring honey, gathered from the early-flowering trees and shrubs and particularly hawthorn, sycamore, and oilseed rape, has a light, floral quality that survives in cream rather than disappearing into it. Autumn honey, which is darker and more strongly flavoured by heather or ivy, overpowers cream and tends to colour the set; spring honey does neither.

The trick with honey is to add it cold, after the cream has been taken off the heat. Boiling burns off honey's perfume. The volatile aromatic compounds that give it its character cook off above 60°C. Stirring the honey in at the end, while the cream is still warm but no longer simmering, keeps the floral notes intact.

The recipe

For four small glasses: 600ml double cream, 4 tablespoons fresh spring honey, the strained juice of two lemons.

Bring the cream to a gentle simmer in a heavy pan, stirring with a wooden spoon to prevent catching, and hold it at the simmer for three minutes. Remove from the heat. Stir in the honey until it has dissolved completely. Stir in the lemon juice. Pour the mixture into four small glasses; cool to room temperature; refrigerate for at least two hours before serving. The set will be firmer at the edges of the glass than at the centre, with a slight floral fragrance from the honey on the spoon.

Sources: Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), Internet Archive; Gervase Markham, The English Housewife (1615), Internet Archive; C. Anne Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain (1973); Victoria and Albert Museum collection of posset cups.